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Is Google Polluting the Internet?
Pickens writes "In 1998, Larry Page and Sergey Brin made a promise: 'We believe the issue of advertising causes enough mixed incentives that it is crucial to have a competitive search engine that is transparent and in the academic realm.' Now, Micah White writes in the Guardian that the vast library that is the internet is flooded with so many advertisements that this commercial barrage is having a cultural impact, where users can no longer tell the difference between content and advertising, and the omnipresence of internet advertising constrains the horizon of our thought. And at the center of it all, with ad space on 85% of all internet sites, is Google. In the gleeful words of CEO Eric Schmidt, 'We are an advertising company.' The danger of allowing an advertising company to control the index of human knowledge is too obvious to ignore, writes White. 'The universal index is the shared heritage of humanity. It ought to be owned by us all. No corporation or nation has the right to privatize the index, commercialize the index, censor what they do not like or auction search ranking to the highest bidder.' Google currently makes nearly all its money from practices its founders once rightly abhorred. 'Now it is up to us to realize the dream of a non-commercial paradigm for organizing the internet. ... We have public libraries. We need a public search engine.'"
Please. Not another sink hole.
You pay for the servers, the bandwidth, and the developers, not to mention the managerial and legal overhead, and make it public without making a profit, and nobody will complain.
For those of us living in the real world, Google's a pretty decent option.
I don't believe in time. It's a grand conspiracy designed to sell watches.
I am amazed that people think google is (a) a good search engine, rather then soemthing to generate profit for google, and (b) that as alarge corporation, google can be trusted to do anything other then max profits.
The idea that a large public company like google will do anything other then maximize profits is silly beyond belief;
There is one small exception: if a company is a quasi monopoly, as google is, then it can indulge in some luxuries, like sponsering summer of code; the epitome of this was the old Bell Labs research center in Murray HIll NJ (at least one Nobel Prize for fundamental science, microwave background).
PS google is willing to invade my privacy and yours with street view; can you do streetview for the personal residences of Page and Brin and the directors and senior executives of Google ? why doesn't someone start a site, www.seehowitfeels.net, that is just devoted to giving Page and Brin the same privacy that ordinary people have. Bet the lawsuits come soon and often
Google didn't make their index of human knowledge for free you know. If you don't like it, make your own. It will cost you billions of dollars, not just to create, but to keep up to date, up to the second.
We've tried this before with GRUB, but it didn't really take off for a multitude of reasons.
cpghost at Cordula's Web.
We're more likely to lose public libraries than gain a public search engine.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
I agree that we need a public people-controlled search-engine, and http://yacy.de/ is sadly the best P2P search engine there is right now. It is, sadly, a major fail as it is written in Java and brings the average desktop computer to it's knees just by doing whatever in the background. A good P2P engine would make a good alternative to the commercial search-engines. There really is no alternative to Google as of now, I've tried the alternatives and they are all epic failz & pure jokes.
9/11: Never forget it was a false-flag operation
... controlled by the US government (who else would have the means and would volunteer?), the same which will soon have an Internet kill switch and is almost completely submerged by lobbyists? Is it really that much better?
Why do you say that? Google did it, and when they started it was little more than a couple of college students.
Can you be Even More Awesome?!
In the beginning, we had a variety of search engines out there. It wasn't necessarily obvious at the time that a company like google would get a near monopoly.
I think the meta question here:
what are the range of services that really ought to be public vs. private/corporate?
The net simply would not exist if it hadn't been for DoD participation. I think we are still missing basic pieces of infrastructure. Some of these simply will not exist without public input.
My sense is that 99% of the time, google works fine-but that 1% of the time it doesn't work is critical.I think clearly identifying that 1% is a good idea and a site that could do that well might be important in its own right.
Just what we need--a public search engine, paid for by taxpayers and managed by "public servants" who get to choose what's indexed and to censor whatever's not politically correct.
Welcome to the Disney Internet.
I'm a Programmer. That's one level above Software Engineer and one level below Engineer.
In connection with spam marketers and clients, it is.
Here is an observation. I have a bunch of news filters for my sites and client site. 5 years ago, these would mostly return real hits (mentions in blogs, or the press, or a link, whatever). Today, they mostly return spam sites (sites that have a bunch of links to real businesses, but no real information and, of course, a bunch of ads). I presume that these sites are mostly put up to get hits from Google searches, and that it must be working (as there are so many of them).
If that's not pollution, I don't know what is.
What we need is "researchers" who are a bit more intelligent. This person claims users "can no longer tell the difference between content and advertising". Based on what? HIs own experience?
Personally, I don't know anyone who has any difficulty in telling the difference.
Why do you say that? Google did it, and when they started it was little more than a couple of college students.
Yes, but it was corporate money that allowed it to be a great success. It was a combination of their great ideas and serious capital. $25 million in 1999 got them started, and $1.67 billion in 2004 got them where they are today.
I am sorry, you are not going to get a billion dollars to build a non-profit search engine. The OP was correct that you would need a governmental body to accomplish this without corporate money.
-- All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing. -- Edmund Burke
This opinion piece is quite the hodgepodge of thoughts. The author brings in Sir Francis Bacon (division of knowledge), then spins off into Jonathan Swift's criticism of indexing knowledge. Apparently, indexes make us "lazy as thinkers." Running through the same discourse is the idea that Google provides an easy way to include advertising which pollutes the internet. And since Google is so omnipresent, it poses a danger. Then, he brings up the idea that since Google is an "advertising company" it cannot be trusted with the knowledge of humanity.
Finally, we come to the (logical?) conclusion that we need an index that is akin to the "public library" so humanity can control "the shared heritage of humanity."
Lazy thinking indeed.
If this is TL;DR, here's the slashdot version:
1. Quote prominent philosophers loosely related to subject matter
2. Make bold claims about high profile company/person
3. Make even bolder claim about "shared heritage of humanity"
...
Profit! from page views.
No, you're just a leech.
If I ever dare disabling AdBlock+ in my browser, I'll have problems with page load times (=my time) + it will be much harder to concentrate on the content in a presence of distracting animations and other crap (=my productivity). On the road it will also lead to increased bandwidth bill (=my money) and shorter battery life (=productivity)
Who is the leech now?
Ah.... but what if the path is merely a maze going nowhere? A ship in a bottle floating in an endless sea of replicating bots who tirelessly analyze our essence and present false choices in an endless stream of nothingness only with the intent to gain our credit card number...
Suppose for a moment, that we are not just entertaining ourselves to death, but are still empowered by our desires to know the truth, to synthesize information in a free society and hold our ideas as our own, and are not just a copy-write infringed info byte of a subsidiary of a monolithic corporation.
The lesson perhaps? Nothing is free. Everything has a price. Search is free, but the road has a toll...for our soul, our individuality.
This is the 21st century, we gotta get with the program. Block the ads. Pay for your hosting, own your domain... pay your dues. Own your identity. Don't sell yourself for nothing. And remember, always make a backup.
The Library of Congress doesn't use the Dewey Decimal System. They use (surprise) the Library of Congress Classification system.
But on topic, they did the categorical classification thing back in the 90s. Yahoo, Dmoz, etc. They still exist, but search engines are more efficient. Entering a single query is easier than clicking through a hierarchy that may be half a dozen levels each. And they'd be even bigger if they tried to categorize any significant portion of the internet.
Directories are still useful if you want to see the most important sites for a subject, but when you want that specific piece of information you can't beat a search engine.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
$5 to $10 monthly?? I'll stick with the adverts thank you very much. Even $0.01 a month would be too much because that means I have to pay $1 every nine years. And since the ads on Google don't bother me at all (and very occasionally even help me), I get no benefit from paying that money.
causing every website that uses Google Analytics and YouTube to take a horrendous time to load. It didn't used to be this way, but within the past year Google's non-search infrastructure has really not scaled very well.
There's already Bing which is just as capable as Google (bit nicer on Image searches, much worse on Usenet group searches). But even if there were a dozen such rival search engines, the addition of a free, public one, wouldn't solve Internet pollution caused by the mere existence of the commercial search engines. For example, try searching for any remotely obscure technical information and you find the same question and answers popping up again and again because some fucking screen scrapers have ripped off the original thread where it occured and put it on their own site. Not only does that make it harder to find varied answers, but it means that it's hard to find the original site and post followup questions or see if anybody else has. There mere existence of big advertising money distorts the Internet. Only if public search engines replaced commercial ones would Internet pollution be reduced.
Aide-toi, le Ciel t'aidera - Jeanne D'Arc.
Is there anything governmental bodies accomplish in this day and age without corporate money?
So if a resource owner fails to monetize the traffic he generated - it's a fault of a customer now? Next step - you're blaming shop visitors for not buying anything, soiling your floor and just leeching you of money you paid to cleaners.
Monetizing traffic is a hard job. If you fail at it - it probably means you should go find another one
Really, why?
The modern world is, whether we like it or not, run by corporations. So, we have corporations like Lockheed Martin developing more weapons to pollute the earth and murder innocent children overseas. Others, like Microsoft, Apple and Oracle are actively trying to remove our personal freedoms, to control our every thought with DRM, to destroy free software, to be the real owners of our computers, cellphones, servers, and other gadgets.
On the other hand, we have companies like Google. Don't get me wrong, I'm not buying into the do no evil bullshit, but I can see what they do on my own: They help Free Software projects get where they are going to, they defend free standards, they donate code to the community, they provide valuable services that we use everyday at no cost. And they keep their ads to a minimum, Google is the only company that run ads that don't make you want to tear your eyeballs off. And all it takes to get rid of them is 30 seconds to install adblock.
Really, I have NOTHING bad to say about google. I use their search engine, their email service for both my personal and my company's email, I use google talk, google trends, Android, I am writing this on Chrome, I use google desktop, google maps, Picasa, Youtube, and countless other services and products from Google. And I haven't ever paid a single buck to them. And I block the fucking ads. They are managing to provide countless awesome services, do shitloads of research, and contribute more than anyone else to the Free Software community and to the world. And they are doing that on ads.
People is worried about user privacy, but Google has the best privacy record ever. Mention one single event in which google misused users data? The kind of thing google is doing can't be done without access to user's information. You want your email on the cloud (and you don't want to pay for a dedicated server + bandwidth?). Your data will need to be in somebody's server. Sorry, there's no other way.
And regarding that stupid comment saying that users can't tell the difference between content and advertising? Come on. Adblock can easily tell the difference, and it's a stupid script. My fucking bayesian filter can differentiate content from Spam. If your users can't tell the difference, your users are too fucking stupid.
WTF am I doing replying to an AC at 5 A.M on a Friday night?
So you want the internet to be shut down, is that what you're arguing for? Or are you not aware that 99.99999999% of the horribly embarrassing photos on the internet had in no way originated with google street view.
In fact the chance of the google van being in front of you when you do something stupid is infinitesimal compared to some asshole with a cell phone being there and instantly uploading your photo to the internet.
Gee, I have no problem whatsoever telling the difference between ads and content on Google (or almost anywhere, for that matter.) Even if this clown can't tell the difference, I can't say it's a universal problem. As far as the search index goes; Google seems to have been a decent steward so far. For what I search for, it produces good results, and they clearly delineate between ads and search results (unlike some other engines) and they have always done so.
I suspect some people (myself included) would happily pay a monthly $5 or $10 to access a search engine that was completely free of adverts or bias. If the market were big enough ...
One would be surprised how many people would rather see adverts than knowingly or inadvertently revealing more private data to them via their billing information by paying for the service.
Morals only apply to those who can afford them.
In our society, for centuries, thievery has been considered immoral. But we all recognize that when you are starving, in order to feed your family you will steal if necessary. In days past you would be hanged if caught. The interesting thing is that to the person stealing, it is/was moral to do what you can/could to feed your family; while to the well fed, it was moral to hang the thief. The soccer team stranded by plane crash in the Andes Mountains ate their dead compatriots. In poor regions of the world, life is sometimes very cheap when the difference between life and death is thin. In the end, if life is good and you can afford morals, you will have them. It all amounts to how much power you have over your own life. Money is just another way to measure power.
-- I ignore anonymous replies to my comments and postings.
You're still the leech. They are providing a service, which is being paid for by advertising. If it bothers you so much, don't use the service.
You don't get to say "oh stopping to buy a ticket slows me down and get in the say so I'm just going to jump over the turnstile" when you're getting in the subway. The same thing applies to ad supported websites.
"Power corrupts; absolute power corrupts absolutely."
Google is not immune. /.ers have seen it time and time again over the years. Microsoft, Oracle, Intel, Apple and now, it appears, Google. They've all succumbed to their successes with excesses.
It truly is very difficult to resist using one's power if one is good enough and lucky enough to get some. Most of us never get to experience this heady state of mind (which is probably a good thing). If we were running Google, we'd already be working on our rationalization speech: "But, we're Google. A company that has pledged to Do No Evil. Be honest: would you rather be spammed by a company like ours or some shadowy, suit-populated advertising broker who is only in it for the money?" Uh, wait a minute. Strike the part about the money...
Nothing really new here.
One "Aw, Shit!" is worth 100 "Ata boys!"
People quickly become remarkably good at spotting the obvious sponsored results from the genuine ones. The basic idea behind this story is that we're all bloody idiots. Well ok, many of us are, but we're also a suspicious lot; so I don't really think this is an issue. The alternative is too horrible to contemplate: an international body (such as the UN), subject to political pressures, controlling search. I would trust a corporation that cares about its share price more than a bunch of faceless bureaucrats dependent on Government for their funding any day.
We have an open source search engine : http://nutch.apache.org./ But we need a distributed index storage system that is uncensorable and/or trackable. Do we have that?
Just FYI, all the old search engines - Excite, Altavista, etc. - are still around. They still suck so bad nobody uses them. It's impressive that Microsoft has managed to improve their search engine to the point where it can actually compete (though still get beaten, mostly in mind-share) by such a dominating search engine as Google. Google left every search engine on the market in the dust ten years ago, and Microsoft has managed to basically catch up in the last few years with Bing. There is still a wide gap between them and the rest of the search engines.
I think a lot of people, the OP especially, forget what the internet was like in the 90's. Yes, advertisements are ubiquitous today, but they are nowhere near as obtrusive as they were 10 years ago. Yeah, overlay adds suck. So do embedded videos with sound that cannot be muted or stopped (my personal pet-peeve at the moment). But it's nothing, nothing compared to the popups and redirects and flashy banner adds of the 90's.
Besides, Google adds are always labeled as such, and are usually very unobtrusive. Frankly, if people are getting confused by a section that says "Ads brought to you by Google", I don't give a shit. I have absolutely no problem with them, and I wish everybody would use unobtrusive Google-esque advertisements. I wish all the remaining popovers and floating ads and banners would be replaced by simple text ads on the side of the web page. That is my internet dream.
Security is mostly a superstition... Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure. - Helen Keller
You're still the leech. They are providing a service, which is being paid for by advertising. If it bothers you so much, don't use the service.
You display a typical arrogant attitude of many webmasters, who fail to realize that they deal not with some "traffic" or "hits". You deal with human beings. An offline business has very strict rules about being polite to customers - but webmasters still have a weird idea that screaming at your customers "LOOK! you've GOT to watch HERE! and now HERE!" constantly while they are at your territory is the best business plan ever. Who the hell would behave like that in their shop?
You don't get to say "oh stopping to buy a ticket slows me down and get in the say so I'm just going to jump over the turnstile" when you're getting in the subway. The same thing applies to ad supported websites.
Wait... you're not asking them to buy tickets before they enter - no, that would be too honest. You're actively pursuing them. You're doing you best to attract them to your site. You probably deprive other sites of search engine ranks in the process. And then you throw at your readers a bunch of flashy banners, tons of distracting underlined text in different colors (because they look like links and draw attention) and wonder why they protect their sanity and peace of mind? Try communicating to them and be polite - for a start.
Do Larry and Sergey really feel this way? It'd certainly be interesting if they did and to hear them describe those opinions. However, it seems like White's article is making uninformed suppositions simply for the purpose of being provocative. In particular, the underlying article states:
With a link to a Google Answers page which indicates:
This is a practice that has existed on Google pages since the very beginning. Nobody's selling the top search result here. Anyone who's used Google before would see that all the ads are separated from search results and clearly labeled as ads.
Advertising certainly is pollution. I no longer watch television shows on television - only shows that can be downloaded. I also use ad blocking software on my browser, use an email app instead of webmail, and listen only to non-commercial radio. You don't have to look at this garbage if you don't want to. As for those who'll say they need advertising to keep their content online: I really wouldn't care much if your content disappeared. I wouldn't mind a bit if we went back to the kind of web we had before all these commercial interests jumped online.
-- sudon't
Air-ride Equipped